Marianne Thorsen is most active as a chamber player. She's founding member and violinist of the well-regarded Leopold String Trio, leader of the Nash Ensemble, and also has toured as a soloist and made numerous recordings in that role. Here she's heard with the Trondheim Solisten, a superb chamber orchestra from the town of her birth, in Mozart's mature violin concertos. She's up against some fearsome competition in these works, including complete sets by the velvet-toned David Oistrakh and the elegant Artur Grumiaux, among many others. If Thorsen doesn't quite take top Mozart honors, she certainly offers excellent performances that generally wed individuality, elegance, and a touch of intensity. There's also a measure of brilliance to much of the playing, especially in the outer movements. In general, tempos are on the expansive side but never veer from the acceptable.

Warm phrasing characterizes slow movements, which flow nicely despite measured tempos. Thus the Adagio of K. 216 is tenderly sung, while in parts of the Andante cantabile of K. 218 Thorsen scales her tone down to a whisper and later brings a hushed intensity to the Adagio of K. 219's cadenza. If some passages seem somewhat underplayed, it may be because the memory of Oistrakh and Grumiaux linger in the brain.

The Trondheim Solisten is a small band (21 players) but sounds much bigger. The strings have bite as well as smoothness; the winds are perfectly balanced and never swamped by the ensemble. Thorsen plays cadenzas by Sam Franko (K.216) and Eugéne Ysaye (K. 218 and K.219).

If Thorsen doesn't eclipse her predecessors, she does trump such more celebrated contemporaries as the usually stunning Maxim Vengerov, whose latest venture into Mozart for EMI is distinguished by torpor and mannerisms that needn't have been immortalized on disc. But if Thorsen's Mozart isn't a mandatory first choice it is a mandatory acquisition for audiophiles, for the sound is among the best I've heard in a long time.

2L is a Norwegian audiophile label whose catalogue includes fine recordings by Norwegian composers, artists, and ensembles. This disc is recorded in what the label calls DXD. Without getting into the technical details, the vividness and life-like naturalness of the recording are striking, recalling the old Mercury Living Presence LPs.

In both CD and SACD stereo formats the sound is involving, close-up but with plenty of width, depth, and air around the instruments. Details like the wind parts or the lower strings' held notes under the soloist in the cadenza of the third movement of K. 218, often lost in recordings, are graphically present here. The gatefold package contains two discs: one a Redbook CD, the other an SACD (stereo and multichannel) only playable on SACD players. Surround sound buffs doubtless will feel that format trumps the others.

--Dan Davis, ClassicsToday.com

This 2-disc set consists of a hybrid Super Audio CD playable on both regular and Super Audio CD players plus an audio-only (i.e., with no video content) Blu-ray disc of the same music playable only on Blu-ray players.

MOZART (Arr. Grieg) Piano Sonatas: in C, K 545; in F, K 533; in G, K 283; in c, K 457 • Dena Pn Duo • 2-L 40 (Hybrid multichannel SACD: 73:10)


Why would anyone, even Edvard Grieg—not the greatest composer by a long shot, but a great musical figure and one who revered Mozart—arrange any Mozart piano sonatas—even the powerful K 457 and the forward-looking K 533—for two pianos? My wariness of arrangements other than those by the composer leads me to ask again, why? Well, if you’ve never tried it (or never heard it), don’t knock it. Keep an open mind! But before I listened, I read. The notes in the accompanying booklet describe what Grieg did. (In English, the small, red font against a purple background is an abominable choice for reading; in German, the white font against the same background is eminently readable, but my German is now a distant memory.) Grieg’s “arrangements” are actually adaptations, or more precisely, augmentations. In each sonata, Grieg retained Mozart’s score as the primo and composed a secundo to add a more contemporary style to the music. Now this is certainly a novel approach to “arranging,” and it may be the first example of crossover. It is akin to the current theatrical practice of presenting Shakespeare in contemporary guise, such as Julius Caesar in Fascist uniforms or The Taming of the Shrew on motorcycles (both courtesy of noted stage director Michael Kahn or those directors he fosters), a practice that I deplore. Then I listened. What I heard were four Mozart sonatas that were as fully recognizable as their originals, but with fuller bass lines, with extra and more complex harmonization, and with significantly non-Mozartian embellishments.


In the early K 283, much more Grieg is discernable in the latter two movements than in the first movement. K 545, Mozart’s easy-to-play and most popular sonata, can be described as complexified simplicity. The power of the first movement of K 457 is greatly weakened by Grieg’s defocusing secundo augmentation. The second movement of K 457 fares even worse, sounding like a mixture of ballroom dance-music with piano noodling by a “stylist.” Grieg’s defocusing secundo augmentation relaxes the tension in the final movement, eventually enervating the normally powerful coda. Most interesting is the first movement of K 533, which is stylistically very open to Grieg’s secundo augmentation. In the K 533 second movement, in a-b-a form, Mozart already achieves Grieg’s contemporary style in part b without Grieg’s intervention. By contemporizing part a, Grieg distracts from the listener’s amazement at the shocking progressions and harmonies that Mozart introduces in part b. But this provides the opportunity in part b for Grieg to really let loose, building interestingly on Mozart’s already impressionistic base. The final movement of K 533 shows the strongest Grieg influence on this disc, masking the movement’s Mozartian delicacy—one could call it, with successive puns, the “MoztGrieg” and the least “Griegzart.”


The Dena Piano Duo (Tina Margareta Nilssen, piano 1, and Heide Görtz, piano 2) are excellent pianists, and the sound quality is also excellent. Nilssen plays the primo (Mozart) part, and Görtz plays the secundo (Grieg) part. I recommend this CD to Grieg scholars and, strictly as a curiosity, to anyone else, but not as an addition to anyone’s Mozart collection.


FANFARE: Burton Rothleder


This is a hybrid Super Audio CD playable on both regular and Super Audio CD players.

The present recording features both one of the longest and one of the shortest quartets in the string quartet repertoire. There is no denying that Schubert´s last string quartet is great in every sense of the word, but Beethoven´s “Quartetto Serioso”, although minor in size, is by no means dwarfed by it when it comes to sheer artistic quality; both quartets are indeed major works and a staple on the diet of any string quartet of merit. Even so, the concept of minor and major immediately springs to mind when contemplating putting these two completely different masterpieces on the same album. Duration apart, there is the obvious question of tonality: one work in F minor, the other in G major, which is simple enough and by itself justifies the album title. But things get more complicated the moment we subject the two works to a closer scrutiny. Oslo String Quartet is widely recognized as one of the most versatile string quartets of our day. Since it was founded in 1991 it has established a reputation as an ensemble that unites high artistic standards with a degree of playfulness and an absolute integrity. The quartet’s concerts and recordings have consistently received acclaim, both by the public and by critics. A strong attachment to the music of Beethoven has resulted in several performances of his complete string quartets, for example in the quartet’s festival “The Beethoven Code” in 2006. Their programmes range from the classic string quartet repertoire to the works of contemporary composers, but also include music in other genres, and their unique versions of, for example, Peer Gynt and Tosca break with what is normally expected of a string quartet.

Mezzotints demonstrates the continuum of the chamber music oeuvre in the contemporary era with solo and chamber works by internationally acclaimed Norwegian contemporary composer St�le Kleiberg whose broad discography includes the Grammy nominated opera David and Bathsheba, and the widely performed 2004 chorale Requiem included in a Washington D.C. performance commemorating the 9/11 U.S. attacks. The inspired playing of Marianne Thorsen, violin; �yvind Gimse, cello; B�rd Monsen, violin; Ole Wuttudal, viola and J�rgen Larsen, piano bring to life the command, technical mastery and great expressiveness of these scores.

This is an audio-only (i.e., with no video content) Blu-ray disc playable only on Blu-ray players.

Stale Kleiberg’s Mass for Modern Man is about the loss of existential meaning as an antithesis to faith and belief. The work commutes between these two extremes, and raises the following underlying question: Is belief possible for modern man? In this work, the answer is ‘yes’: not a resounding ‘yes,’ but a ‘yes’ in spite of all. The work is a large-scale concert mass for two soloists, choir and orchestra where Kleiberg’s neo-romantic music commutes between the intimate and the grand. Stale Kleiberg (b. 1958) is a major Norwegian composer with a considerable international reputation. His music is widely performed in Norway and abroad, and is mostly commissioned by well-established orchestras, ensembles, and performers. There are also many published recordings of his music, including seven albums (the present one is number eight), that have received outstanding international reviews. Kleiberg’s music is characterized by a highly distinctive form of extended tonality and by meticulous attention to coloristic details.

Mention of Japanese composer Karen Tanaka in these pages has been very brief, but always complimentary: her string quartet, At the Grave of Beethoven, reviewed more than a decade ago, and two of her very short piano works featured on this new release, Northern Lights and Lavender Field, played by Thalia Myers on two anthologies, reviewed here. This appears to be the first CD devoted entirely to her works - the nearest thing to date was 'Invisible Curve', a disc of chamber music released on New World Records (80683) in 2008, which she shared with Chinese composer Chen Yi.

Crystalline I and II, which open and close this fascinating recital respectively, were written a few years apart, the latter an obvious follow-up to the first. According to the liner-notes, the title reflects the composer's intention to create a "rendering of a cool timeless world of glittering, sparkling crystals." The style and sonorities of Crystalline I, one of Tanaka's earlier works, give a good idea of what to expect from her piano music - detail, delicacy, consonance, timbral sculpturing, sensuality.

The 'prismatic' idea of the Crystallines recurs in the most recent of Tanaka's piano pieces, Water Dance - actually a set of three dances - which was commissioned by Norwegian pianist Signe Bakke herself, who has had a working relationship with Tanaka for some time. The 'water' element is not the musically archetypal undulation of waves or ebb and flow of tides, but more the play of light on the shimmering surface of a clear - crystalline, one may say - mountain stream.

One great service Tanaka renders art music in works like Water Dance or the Techno Etudes, is to expose the mountebankery of mainstream minimalism. Her music here is a minimalism of sorts, but so much more intelligent, more inventive, more profound than the piano music of, say, Philip Glass or Ludovico Einaudi, or a thousand anonymous Hollywood film scores. Tanaka studied at IRCAM with Tristan Murail, famed for his so-called 'spectral' music, which clearly had a strong influence on her own stated interest in the "transformation of timbre in space, analogous to a gradual change of light refraction in crystals and prisms".

A different side of Tanaka's pianism can be heard in the Children of Light, a set of simple but exquisite melodic miniatures written for children, both to enjoy and play - although one of them at least, African Elephant, sounds far from easy! Some of the pieces are so instantly, deliciously memorable that listeners will be amazed that this is the first time of hearing. As an educational bonus to children, there is an overall ecological theme - each piece describes the special natural beauty of or a threatened species of animal from different parts of the world. The eight varied items selected here are from a total of twenty; what a pity, on this evidence, that the rest were not recorded - there would surely have been enough space on this disc, which, though otherwise excellent in every regard, is rather brazenly on the short side.

There are two pieces in Bakke's recital with the title Northern Lights, one from the Children of Light collection, the second a stand-alone work commissioned by the Royal School of Music with Lavender Field for teaching purposes. The CD booklet gives Tanaka's instructions to learners for performing these rhythmic, succinct pieces - both of which, incidentally, were recorded by Thalia Myers on the CDs linked to above. For Lavender Field, for example, the player is told to "imagine weaving colour and scent with sounds. The harmonic series on E flat appears and disappears into space at the end."

In all the above works the pianist must show great finesse and sensitivity, a demand which Bakke meets with total reliability. In the curiously named Techno Etudes, on the other hand, the accent is firmly on virtuosity, particularly rhythmic speed - and again Bakke is equal to it. The music was commissioned by Japanese pianist Tomoko Mukayama, who originally asked for a work to synchronise with some pre-taped 'techno' music. Though the techno idea was thankfully dropped, the title stuck, as did the emphasis on an almost robotic drive and great velocity. This is hypnotic, primal music, and the CD notes argue the case, not altogether convincingly, that it expresses at a deep level similar ideas to the far more delicate, complex sounds of the 'crystalline' works. Quite inventively, the notes describe the particularly virtuosic first movement as sounding like "a frenetic boogie-woogie machine that sometimes seems to get stuck".

The sound quality on this hybrid SACD is immaculate, even listening in normal stereo. This is how solo piano music should be recorded. The booklet, the back cover of which is glued onto the cardboard case, has well-written, detailed notes in English and Norwegian. Oddly, Tanaka does not get a mention on the front cover or the CD itself.

Playing time aside, a superb release.

-- Byzantion, MusicWeb International

This is a hybrid Super Audio CD playable on both regular and Super Audio CD players.

This is a hybrid Super Audio CD playable on both regular and Super Audio CD players.

Neither dense nor ecstatically florid this Requiem tracks a delightfully naive trajectory.

Before discovering this disc, Islandsmoen had been completely unknown to me. In fact, in addition to this Requiem, not performed until 1943, there are two symphonies, a Norsk Overture and an opera Gudrun Laugar. In addition he wrote major choral orchestral works, principally: Israel i fangenskap (Israel in Captivity) (1931), Heimat fra Babel (Home from Babel) (1934) and his final work of this type, the Missa Solemnis (1954).

The Requiem builds its thematic material on folk music from Valdres in Norway. The opening Canto Funebre for orchestra is aligned along the same axis as Brahms (Requiem) and Finzi. The music moves between contented and tormented. It radiates a ruddy folksy glow filtered through a serious classical fabric. Early Nielsen might be a good analogue for what we hear. The music is certainly in a conservative and approachable idiom. There are however moments where more modern works are recalled including - in the Kyrie Eleison - the ricocheting alleluias at the end of Hilding Rosenberg's Fourth Symphony Johannes Uppenbarelse. The fugal Confutatis rushes along with a fiery rhythmically biting urgency melting into a seraphic lento. This is echoed in the Oro supplex in which this particular alto sounds strained when singing pianissimo. This is in contrast to the secure tenor. The composer often reaches for a boisterousness that is part Handelian in its beefy sense of well-being. From that angle you might draw parallels with Havergal Brian's similarly steroidal grandiose Fourth Symphony. More forward looking is the final Agnus Dei which again keys into the calorie-rich melisma of Rosenberg's choral works.

Strange how this work dropped from the repertoire except when you recall that the eclipse of its tonal star came as the Darmstadt school rose to post-war ascendancy.

It is good to see the Islandsmoen Requiem again drawing attention. I hope that choral societies beyond Islandsmoen’s native Norway will want to tackle this work and that there will be revivals of the other works especially the symphonies. Nowhere near as dense as the Frank Martin Requiem nor as ecstatically florid as Howells this Requiem tracks a delightfully naive trajectory.

I reviewed this SACD on a standard CD player.

-- Rob Barnett, MusicWeb International

GRIEG Holberg Suite. 2 Nordic Melodies, op. 63. AMPER Abrégé 1. G. LARSEN Diplom 2 • Trondheim Soloists; 1 Amilia Amper (nyckelharpa); 2 Gjermund Larsen (fiddle) • 2L 68 (Blu-ray and SACD: 57:34)


Simply put, this release offers the most stunning engineering I’ve ever experienced. It’s hard to describe it without falling back on over-familiar tropes, but if I ever wanted to demonstrate the value of high-resolution, multichannel sound, this is the recording I’d choose, the one that best creates the illusion that the musicians are actually there in the room with you. Granted, there are a dizzying number of possible formats: 2L offers an audio-only Blu-ray (with 7.1 DTS HA MA 24/96kHz and both 5.1 DTS HD MA and 2.0 LPCM in 24/192kHz), as well as an SACD with the usual three options, and (in case that’s not enough) online access to MP3 and FLAC versions. I haven’t listened to the downloads, but I’ve sampled the rest, and to my ears, the 7.1 version offers the most engaging acoustical environment. In immediate comparison, the two-channel versions are distinctly less involving—and I suspect that would be true even if the surround tracks didn’t put you at the center of the ensemble (with violins behind you, soloists and other strings in front—it makes a particularly wonderful effect at the beginning of the second half of Grieg’s op. 63/2). Heard on their own, though, the stereo versions certainly offer first-class sound, too.


The music and performances are a consistent delight. The Trondheim Soloists take a buoyant and textually transparent approach to the Holberg Suite , playing down its potential neoclassical severity and playing up its charm. Thus, for instance, the accents on the Gavotte are clear, but never biting; the Air achieves its poignance without a trace of pain; rhythms throughout are infectious, but never aggressive. The same qualities mark the performance of the Nordic Melodies . Not the only way to deliver this music, of course, but entirely engrossing.


The disc is filled out with two folk-inspired suites by contemporary musicians. The notes, unfortunately, are not as lucid as the performances, but the five-movement Abrégé seems to be a compilation of pieces by the Norwegian folk group Väsen (one based on a traditional tune, the others apparently not), arranged by Johannes Leonard Rusten of the Trondheim Soloists. Although Amelia Amper is listed as “composer,” it’s not clear what her compositional role is. She does, however, contribute virtuoso solo work on the nyckelharpa (described in the notes as “a type of fiddle with a chromatic keyboard, … played with a bow and … [including] resonating strings”), its slightly acrid sound adding considerably to the effect. Diplom , by fiddler Gjermund Larsen, is described as “a new composition … composed using traditional styles.” Both works are for the most part simple in outline and texture (no Bartók or even Grainger here), with catchy tunes and rhythms. I could single out, for special mention, the hypnotic rhythms in the last movement of Abrégé or the supple lamentation of the solo fiddle in the middle movement of the Larsen; but in fact, from beginning to end, these pieces will keep you spellbound. I only wish that 2L had translated the titles of the movements: knowing, for instance, that “Kapten Kapsyl” means “Captain Bottlecap” or that “Till Farmor” means “To Grandmother” (information I picked up from the Väsen Web site) adds to our appreciation.


All in all, though, exuberantly recommended, especially for people with the equipment necessary to take full advantage.


FANFARE: Peter J. Rabinowitz

This album was nominated for the 2007 Grammy Awards for "Best Choral Performance" and "Best Surround Sound Album."
This is a hybrid Super Audio CD playable on both regular and Super Audio CD players.

In 2013, The Church of Norway adopted their new Hymnal. The goal of this new hymnal was to hold firmly to the traditions of earlier hymn books, and two bring a modern spin to them with new harmonic ideas. This Nordic hymns are an irreplaceable part of Scandinavian heritage. The texts deal with joy and sorrow, faith and doubt, and put into words some of life’s most joyful and painful vents. The hymn tradition is a constantly moving, living, breathing part of this culture. Formed in 2002, Uranienborg Vocal Ensemble consists of 20-24 singers and is conducted by its founder, Elisabeth Holte. The choir frequently performs in church services at Uranienborg church in Oslo. The group has also toured across Europe and the United States.

This is a hybrid Super Audio CD playable on both regular and Super Audio CD players.

The combination of Haydn Opus 77/1, Nordheim's Duplex and Bartók's Fifth String Quartet, was an irresistible challenge for us. A choice of programme from our hearts. We aim for our recordings to be like our concerts, with balance throughout the programme and a feeling of having fulfilled a journey at the end. It is also imperative for us to have a close relationship with the works we record. Our primarius, Arvid, has a special connection with both Bartók's Fifth Quartet through his mentor Sándor Végh, and with Duplex because of his contact with Arne Nordheim. The great quartets of Joseph Haydn are an ongoing project, and the joyful opening of Opus 77/1 sweeps the listener headlong into our third programme with 2L. Duplex is also one of Nordheim's later works. It is an extreme work, filled with contrasts, virtuosity and beauty and is among the most accessible of Nordheim's output. As with Haydn in opus 77/1, Bartók has found a comprehensive and unique musical language in his Fifth Quartet, an undisputable masterpiece.

The Engegård Quartet made their first appearance at the 2006 Lofoten International Chamber Music Festival. Inspired by the midnight sun, their musical landscape ranges from glowing core energy to the gentle lyrical sound of Norwegian nature.